Beauty Notes – Resistance is Beautiful
– “As opposed to beauty, the sublime does not cause an immediate feeling of pleasure. As in Burke, the initial sensation in reaction to the sublime is pain or displeasure. The sublime is too enormous, too huge for the imagination, which cannot capture it and is unable to condense it into a picture.” (Byung-Chul Han in Saving Beauty).
– I’d been waiting for Wim Wenders’s Anselm to come out on DVD. We’d missed the Fallen Angels show at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence though I’d been following about it online. When we were there it had been replaced by the Frankenthaler show. On the notes to the exhibition, the work is summarized: “Anselm Kiefer is involved in an impactful, richly-layered work that explore themes of memory, myth, history, literature, and poetry. Every work of Kiefer expresses a refusal of limits—not only through scale and materiality—but also through the infinite richness of resources with which he probes the depths of memory and the past.”
– “History is my material.” (Anselm Kiefer)
— I’ve long been drawn to his work. The lead books, the angel wings, the sunflowers dropping their seeds. The materials he uses in layers, the burning of parts of the work, the straw, and dung, and lead. The alchemy that he conjures. His process is thoughtful, steeped in the philosophical, steeped in history and mythology, personal experience. It’s pretty dark stuff but there’s layers and cracks and light, gold even. Wings. I liked the silence of Kiefer in the movie. The process was the star of the show and this allowed the mystery of the process to be revealed in slivers or shards. Nothing was ruined. (Everything is in ruins).
— I felt watching the movie that it was a work of art about art and that it didn’t compromise. Is the film beautiful? I felt transformed by watching it. Part of the alchemical moment, if briefly.
— The fact that Wim Wenders, who made that masterpiece Wings of Desire, made this movie about Kiefer, he of the fallen angels, just made me feel like sometimes the universe creates the proper confluences and collisions. It felt inevitable.
– “The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.”
– “I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.”
— “I cannot see a landscape on which war has not left its trace.” “History is my material.”
— Anselm Kiefer
– You can make an incredible film about art and process and someone will call it boring. I really hate that. That is what is boring.
— “I will resist you with my last ounce of strength!” (Jean-Luc Picard to the Borg, who enjoy saying, “Resistance is futile.”)
— Art as resistance. The power of art. That is beautiful. Resistance, rather than being futile, is beautiful. I repeat, resistance is beautiful.
— “Visual images have enormous power. Artists send their images out into the world, sometimes without realizing their impact. Putting forth harmonious vibrations through art is essential for the well-being of society.” (Audrey Flack, in Art & Soul: Notes on Creating).
“The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.”
―Friedrich Nietzsche
— On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry came out in 2001 and it seems to be time for re-read. Some favourite quotations:
“The surfaces of the world are aesthetically uneven. You come around a bend in the road, and the world suddenly falls open…”
“At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.”
“…what happens, happens to our bodies. When we come upon beautiful things — the tiny mauve-orange-blue moth on the brick, Augustine’s cake, a sentence about innocence in Hampshire — they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space; or they form ‘ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world,’ or they lift us…letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before.”
— The small tears are still there, waiting to pull us through. We can still insist on beauty. We can steep our art in history and mythology, perhaps not to the scale of Anselm Kiefer, but we can use beauty and art-making as resistance.
